


Coneflower Honey

by ambiguously



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Background Reylo, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Kylo Ren Has Issues, Major Illness, Telepathy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-10-31 18:49:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20799335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambiguously/pseuds/ambiguously
Summary: General Organa is seriously ill. The Supreme Leader of the First Order is the only person in the galaxy who knows what's wrong with her.





	Coneflower Honey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lucymonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/gifts).

> Contains mention of a minor canon character's non-canonical death several years prior to the story.

His mother is ill.

Kylo feels her spirit through the Force, the same way he knew when Rey cut open her hand while removing a panel on the _Falcon_'s bulkhead. Once upon a time he could sense the flows and eddies of moods and curiosities and lusts and lonelinesses of all the users of the Force he'd known, no matter how far away. Once he'd been bombarded with the feelings of the other students his uncle had been teaching, buffeting him like waves. The rest are dead, and the tumult is now a trickle. He can sense his mother across stars. He knows she is ebbing.

He thinks the Supreme Leader of the First Order should be glad to know the leader of his enemies lies close to death. He thinks there should be celebrations, proclamations, official statements of approval. He thinks, and he thinks more. The voices inside his head once sounded like the diseased murmurs of his Master but Snoke is gone. The voices are all his own now: reprimanding him for not acting enough like an overlord, muttering how his underlings plot against him, reminding him of the springy curls he ran his fingers through when his mother unplaited her braids after work, hissing that he is losing his mind. He half-expected his uncle's shade to appear, but Luke Skywalker will have to take a number in line to get in a word edgewise around the rest of Kylo's demons whose whispers tickle the hairs of his ears.

"Be still!" he snaps at the cacophony inside his skull. He says the words out loud, another piece of evidence towards that last suspicion, and something already accepted as truth by the skittering, insignificant minions failing to follow his orders.

"Show me the latest intelligence on the Resistance," he says. A frightened lackey brings up the information on a terminal. Systems with sympathetic leanings towards his mother's cause. Engagements with small groups of fighters over worlds well away from here. Spies exchanging secrets with their counterparts in the dark. Nothing useful.

He turns and stalks away, aware of their eyes on his turned back, aware of their terror and their belief that Kylo Ren is unstable. The plots against him don't live only inside his head.

He ignores them, returning to his own room and thumbing the lock behind him. Meditation was his uncle's first and most frequent teaching. Kylo has never had a taste for kneeling and waiting for the Force to pay attention to him. Nonetheless, he seats himself on the floor, and closes his eyes.

Outside his quarters, he feels the shapes of the minds populating this ship. He stretches past them, reaching towards the beacons inside his mind that call like a constant hum from beyond the night.

His mother's presence is thready. He can't make contact with her. Fortunately, he has a backup.

_"Leave me alone,"_ Rey tells him the instant she feels him touching her mind. _"I'm busy and I hate you."_

_"This isn't a social call. What happened to her?"_

He doesn't know if Rey has told her friends about their little chats. Kylo himself has no one to tell. He's grown used to her, and she to him, each one's thoughts bending to accommodate the unnatural presence of the other like two mir trees whose branches graft themselves into one strong trunk as they send their merged shoots high towards the faraway sky.

Rey is silent for a long time. She hasn't closed herself off to him. She's considering her answer. She's also amused by his latest metaphor although she won't say so in words.

_"The General grew ill two nights ago. The doctors don't know why."_

Possibilities dash through his mind. He's not sure if Rey hears him: disease contracted from whatever hole they're hiding in, poison (not from him, no, but he wouldn't put it past one of Hux's operatives), belated reaction to an old toxin, some previously unknown surprise inside her genes, the brunt of her years and her losses causing a psychological break.

_"You didn't poison her?"_ She seems disbelieving, but Rey knows Kylo can't lie to her here. _"It seems like poison,"_ she tells him.

_"Is she conscious?"_

_"Sometimes. Not now."_ Rey's mind is slipping away. He disturbed her while she was in her bunk and almost asleep. He listens to the idle drift of her thoughts. He doesn't follow her into her dreams. He's afraid of finding out if he's in them or not.

His mother will climb back to consciousness, and he will see what can be done.

The Supreme Leader should chase her into her grave. The voice inside his head telling him so sounds like Hux, therefore he ignores it.

Kylo Ren has made a study of murdering every last trace of Ben Solo, only to find the fool popping up somewhere else he wasn't expecting. Now he's faced with a memory of the stupid boy he was, flashing his gapped smile as his mother held his hand, walking with him through a high-ceiling palace. Mother was still a Princess, and the tiny boy at her side had thought this must be her castle. She even showed him a portrait of a long-dead Queen and said, "That's your grandmother."

They had not come to see the palace, nor the portrait of the child-queen. They had come because someone else had died, someone Ben didn't remember meeting: the Queen's father, but he was no king. The planet's customs elected their monarchs, Ben learned later. His mother wasn't a princess there, and he was no prince. The queen's father was set to rest far from the royal crypt where Ben's grandmother had been interred. He'd taken ill suddenly. The boy he had been paid attention, and the man's he's become remembers.

_"Tell me your symptoms,"_ is the first thing he says when he feels his mother's waking mind.

_"I'm glad you came, Ben. Even if it's only to gloat."_ Hers is the thought of someone who expects to die. 

_"Pain? Short breath?"_ She doesn't have to respond. He can feel her clearly through the link now. It's been a long time since he was this aware of her, and the realization comes with a sharp pain of its own.

_"I felt that."_

Kylo slams shut the connection, angry and bitter. He contacted her out of curiosity. The Supreme Leader is happy to know the leader of the Resistance is dying.

He storms out of his quarters, startling the stormtroopers posted as guard. Guarding him from what, he doesn't know, and he suspects they are there to guard others from him, to spy on his movements and report back.

He shoves one into the wall with his powers. "Ready my ship," he orders the other. The first scrambles to his feet and scurries after his companion. Kylo doesn't bother checking in at the Bridge. "I will be away for some time," he says into the communications panel. "Don't do anything stupid in my absence." That should rile up his high-ranking enemies. If he's lucky, they'll plot against one another while he's gone, clearing out the detritus at the top.

His personal ship is already prepared when he reaches the landing bay. The Supreme Leader should accept his men have done their jobs, but Kylo grew up on a cantankerous flying piece of junk and performs his own checks now. Sabotage is unlikely, but incompetence is everywhere. Satisfied, he boards.

"Supreme Leader, what is your destination?" asks a brave or idiotic underling with a datapad and a worried face under her gray hat.

"I am visiting my grandmother." He slams the hatch shut.

The journey to Naboo gives him time to think, which he hates. The voices in his head, all screaming at him all the time back on his flagship, mute themselves out here, leaving only one voice to berate him without mercy.

You should go back, the quiet voice tells him, and it does not mean he should return to the _Finalizer_.

Naboo is kept in a staid beauty that was almost ruined more than once. Kylo was taught young how to evade the regular scanners watching the skies over a planet, and he brings in his ship without a hail from planetary defense. He leaves it far outside the city. With some annoyance, he also leaves his cloak, his gauntlets, and other identifying pieces of his clothing, along with his lightsaber. He's simply another traveler on this sickeningly beautiful world.

Most travelers don't use the Force to track down the physician who attended their great-grandfathers' deaths, nor could they use those same powers to extract the information they need. Kylo refuses to waste his time waiting around for a better option. He learns that the disorder which killed Ruwee Naberrie has since been cured. From the time of his arrival until the time he has the medicine in hand, the sun has barely had time to cross the sky.

"It won't do you any good," the physician tells him. "The disorder is rare. Offworlders never come down with it."

"Someone has," he says. He considers killing the woman, but there's no point. She doesn't know who he is or why he's come, and that information would help no one.

_"You've changed positions,"_ Rey thinks at him as he makes his way back to his ship. _"You won't find us."_

_"I can always find you,"_ Kylo thinks back to her, and he enjoys her squirm of sudden concern as she remembers he can't tell her a lie.

_"You'd have attacked us months ago."_

_"You're more interesting to chase than to catch."_ He doesn't know why he's teasing her like this, except that he does and so does she.

Rey doesn't reply for a long time, long enough for him to go through his takeoff checks and breach the icy blue of the sky. _"Finn's here. I've told him what you said. Now he's enumerating all the things he intends to do to you the next time he sees you in person. He's very descriptive."_

_"Tell him I'm flattered."_

He feels the peal of unexpected laughter from her. _"I'm not telling him that."_

_"Tell him he'll have his opportunity in,"_ Kylo checks his navicomputer and engages the hyperdrive, _"five hours."_

It's too long. He hasn't felt his mother's mind stir again since the conversation he ended so abruptly. He was too small to understand what had happened to Ruwee. He's not sure how much time there is remaining, if the medicine will work by the time he arrives, or if he'll be showing up for a funeral.

The last voice inside his own mind is silent now. There's no one here with him as he soars through the cascading blue of hyperspace: not Rey, not Mother, not any ghosts, and not his own demons. Prisoners go mad alone, shoved into boxes and left to drift, marooned in the inky dark between the stars. He's been mad half his life, it seems. Perhaps he will be stranded here and go sane.

He makes three jumps. His final destination changes each time. The second time, he considers returning to the _Finalizer_ with his prize and holding it as a reward for the Resistance to send their leader to him. Instead he changes course.

The planetoid is not what he expected. There's no way the Resistance fleet, slowly rebuilding after their losses, keeps more than a skeleton garrison here.

Five hours. Enough for Rey to change her own location to where he won't find the rest of the Resistance, and almost enough time to evacuate the rest from where he first felt her presence. He could send a message to the First Order and give them the location of the base. But that wouldn't be any fun.

"Unknown ship," drones the hail. "Do not come any closer."

Kylo activates his comm. "Rey knows I'm coming." He could threaten to attack. Undermining their faith in Rey is more useful. She'll be viewed with suspicion from now on. It will encourage her to leave the Resistance and join him. Maybe.

"Proceed to the landing area. If you deviate from your flight path, you will be destroyed."

Kylo brings his ship in, performing a single loop in sulky insurrection before he sets down. He opens the hatch, and is greeted by the business end of a blaster rifle.

"Don't get any ideas," says FN-2187. "Rey asked me not to shoot you, and I'd hate to disappoint her."

He's not lying. Even without the aura of the Force helping to reveal his thoughts, Kylo understands his former stormtrooper is a present Resistance fighter due to Rey's influence.

"She has that effect on people," Kylo says. He raises his hands, showing the small phial in his left.

"What is that?"

"Your General needs it."

"Sure she does. Come to finish poisoning her?" He's worried. Mother's illness has progressed. Kylo can feel her here on this world, and she is dying.

Pride says to drop it and let the medicine trickle from the broken phial into the deck grill under his feet.

Old grudges say to kill FN-2187 with a twitch of his powers and blast this tiny garrison into cinders.

Memory recalls the give and play of cascading brown curls loosened after a long day as Mother bent to lift him into her arms.

He holds out the phial.

"Take it."

FN-2187's eyes focus on the medicine, believing it to be some sort of weapon. Not poison now, but a bomb. "I don't think so."

"It's fine," Rey says, walking up behind him. She places a calm hand against FN-2187's arm. "He's telling the truth."

His eyes don't shift. "I've known him a lot longer than you. He never tells the truth."

"You take it," Kylo says to Rey. "It should be enough."

She approaches him, touching his hand as she takes the prize, folding her fingers around the small cylinder. He stops the shiver that wants to overtake his body. Rey senses it anyway, he knows.

"You can't trust him," says FN-2187.

"I don't." Her thoughts are open to him, and he's knows she's telling the truth. "Are you coming?"

"I should get back."

"You should come see her."

"No," says FN-2187. "Rey, no. We can't let Darth Headcase anywhere near the General. He'll kill her." 

"He won't." Rey turns and walks away. She doesn't have to say anything. They fall in behind her, sharing annoyed glares but not fighting. This is a truce, brokered by Rey and fragile as crystal.

The medical facility here is a small room that stinks of spoiled bacta and old blood. His mother lies in the only bed. Kylo hasn't seen her this close in years, and notes every wrinkle that he's put on her face, every hair he's personally grayed. When he was a boy, she often told him the galaxy is a sorrowful place and the duty of every intelligent being is to lessen the suffering of others. How she must have ached and aged each time he added to it, knowingly and willingly. The illness she suffers may have been inherited from her ancestors, but her greatest pain has come from the other direction along the family tree.

Rey hands the phial to the med droid attending her, an ancient unit that should have been retired during the Clone Wars. "This might help her."

The droid takes the phial and scans it. "Unknown tincture. Biological origin of vegetative material not verified."

Kylo folds his arms. "The flowers only grow on Naboo. She's having a reaction, no doubt triggered by some spore or flea or something from one of your wretched hiding holes. It will kill her if you don't treat her now."

"Works out well for you," says FN-2187. "Why are you helping?"

Kylo steps to Mother's side. Neither of the humans nor the droid try to stop him. "Because if any of you are to die, it should be at my hands, not because your body shuts down over a bit of dust." She's changed her hairstyle. He resists from stroking it, from touching her, from breaking further. "The same thing killed her grandfather. This will help. She has to drink it."

FN-2187 says, "You can't be serious."

Rey takes his hand, and he calms. "Finn, I don't ever trust him, but I trust him now. Do you trust me?"

FN-2187 looks at her, and Kylo wonders if his own face makes that same soft expression when he's the one she's talking to, when she's touching his hand that way.

_"It does,"_ Rey thinks, not looking at him.

Kylo doesn't know how this works. In his imagination, which fed him with stories all along his path to this place, as soon as she was given the draught, she sat up with her eyes sparkling to thank him. Nothing happens. His mother's eyes are closed. He's come too late. He feels the old angers rise in his feet, burning up his limbs. Nothing ever happens the way he wants. The voices in his head mutter to him with all his failures. Close by, he can feel Rey move from reassuring to wary as she picks up on his shifting mood.

_"You've always been your own worst enemy,"_ comes the thought, quiet but cutting through the tumult. Mother's eyes are still shut. She's barely conscious. _"It's why you went looking for new ones. Someone you could fight."_

"That's not true," he says out loud, ignoring the confused expressions from the others. "My enemies are in this room."

"Then why did you come?" his mother asks. Her voice is weak, but he can already feel the thin threads of life weaving together in growing strength. It may take weeks for her to recover fully, but she will recover.

"I said already. No one gets to kill you except me."

"I love you, too, Ben."

The name shudders through him, igniting the fire he already feels in his feet. Without another word, he turns, pushing past Rey and FN-2187, ignoring them, heading towards his ship. He expects Rey to follow him, plead with him. He's disappointed and mildly hurt when she doesn't.

_"You could stay,"_ his mother thinks. _"You've come this far. You could stay for dinner."_ The ludicrousness of the image strikes him: himself sitting uncomfortably at table with his ill mother, with an ex-stormtrooper who wants him dead, and with a Jedi he'll face in battle again one day soon, both knowing only one of them will walk away alive. They'll be exchanging death threats over the soup.

_"Maybe, but it's good soup,"_ Rey thinks. _"Finn has promised not to shoot you."_

He's reached his ship. He pauses at the hatch. The Supreme Leader of the First Order should return and share the intelligence he has gathered during this mission. The Supreme Leader should attack this spit of a base, killing his enemies here as he told them he would. The Supreme Leader would not have dropped everything to fly to Naboo in the first place.

The Supreme Leader hasn't eaten all day.

The voices living inside his head have nothing to say on the matter. The voice he thinks might be himself says it's just dinner.

He turns around and slowly walks back inside.


End file.
